Earlier this year, Project leads @johnjamesjacoby, @boonebgorges, and @djpaul presented a number of strategic priorities which included defining the primary intended audience for BuddyPress: Site Builders and WordPress Developers, an explicit recognition of what BuddyPress has become, and how people use it.

Help us start the year right in 2017. Your feedback is important to help us improve BuddyPress by ensuring that we’re still building what you want to use and help us determine if any course corrections are necessary.

This survey will run from November 1 – 30 December 15, 2016. It has 36 questions and could take around 15 – 20 minutes to complete.

BuddyPress 2.7 “Migliaccio” is now available for download from the WordPress.org plugin repository, or right from your WordPress Dashboard. “Migliaccio” focuses on new features for developers and site builders.

Improved Profile Date Field
New Date Field settings, “Date format” and “Range”, make it easier for site administrators to decide how date-based data will be collected and displayed.

Group Types Integration in Templates
Enable developers to show Group Types on the front end as well as control where the group type information is rendered. Learn how to implement this feature.

Use the Site Icon as Your Site’s Profile Photo
BuddyPress sets the site admin’s profile photo as the default site profile photo on the Sites Directory page. You can now use the Site Icon introduced in WordPress 4.3 instead.

Member Type and Group Type Filters in Users and Groups Admin Screens
Easily filter your members and groups by type and set types in bulk on the users and groups list tables in the dashboard.

Localized Timestamps
Fix inaccurate timestamps due to time zones or page caching with new client-side timestamp handling.

Links to Unsubscribe from Emails
Improve user experience by facilitating the removal of any or all subscriptions via new email tokens and unsubscribe links.

Use WP Page Names for Headings of BP Directory Pages
Whatever you choose as the title of your Activity, Sites, Members, or Groups directory pages on the back end, is what you’ll get as the heading on the front end.

Accessibility Updates for the Front End and Back End
Continued improvements for universal access help make BuddyPress back- and front-end screens usable for everyone (and on more devices).

Refactored BP_Button Class to Accept New Arguments
Provides developers with improved syntax and more control over the rendering of buttons.

Improvements to a Single Group’s Management Screens
Improved markup, new modular group management templates, and a new member search form are just some of the enhancements added to the single group admin screens.

Support for Querying for Groups by New Column parent_id
Query support for hierarchical groups makes it much easier for developers to add custom front-end functionality.

Many, Many Performance Improvements
Improved performance by removing extra database queries, adding new cache calls, and removing the number of loops in bp_get_user_groups().

…and much more!
Read about all the bug fixes and feature enhancements introduced in BuddyPress 2.7.0 at our official 2.7.0 changelog.

Meet you at Sam’s

We’ve called BuddyPress 2.7 “Migliaccio”, in honor of the family that runs Sam’s Restaurant in Brooklyn. Don’t be fooled by the “Steaks” and “Chops” signs out front: the Italian food here is great, but the pizza stands apart as one of the great underappreciated pies in all of NYC. As a bonus, careful observers just might spot hanging in Sam’s a photo of a certain BuddyPress developer, taken on the day he became a father. It’s a real family joint!

BuddyPress 2.7.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing. Please download the 2.7.0-rc2 zip or get a copy via our Subversion repository.

This is our last chance to find any bugs that slipped through Release Candidate 1. So please test with your themes and plugins. A detailed changelog will be part of our official release notes, but you can get a quick overview by reading the post about the 2.7.0 Beta 1 release.

BuddyPress 2.7.0 Beta 1 is lovingly packed with new features and enhancements and is now available for testing. You can download the BP 2.7.0-beta1 zip or get a copy via our Subversion repository. We’d love to have your feedback and testing help.